MagnusWootton said:
If you make the game characters sorta like Karl Sims evolved creatures they do most the work themselves, and u just have to write the code that motivates the behavior instead of the explicit animations, and its a lot easier.

Yeah, exactly.
Though, that Sims stuff ignores the key problem, which is balancing a tall humanoid on two small feet forming a very small support polygon. I did not find much in robotics papers to help me on that.

MagnusWootton said:
Im actually working on lighting now

Hehe, sadly i waste all my time on lighting.
Working on ragdolls only very rarely for short durations of time. : (

Blackberry said:
Seriously man, you say you want to see this simulation replace animation, but where would be the best place for that to begin!?

Well, i was playing around with that physics engine and saw it has to potential to simulate humonoids.
This was the end of my game dev carreer. I've decided to focus on research. I was already working on realtime GI, and i started with ragdolls, and back then i felt i like research more than working on games directly.
If you want to work on a game, i do not recommend to work on robotics too, since you can't do both, i would say.
So maybe you better work with what's current state of the art and wait until Epic / Unity integrates related features ready for everyone.

However, my personall journey on this was like that:

Figure out a way to do the simulation. The tiny and lightweight toes body has to carry all the weight of 20 ragdoll bodies. (Conventional physics engines lack the required accuracy and robustenss of joints and motors, but some have robotics support now.)

Test it with playign back some animation. They joint motors should be accurate enough to do this precisly - otherwise no chance it will work for real locomotion.

Work on balancing. Good toy problem is move the center of mass of the entire ragdoll to some target position as fast as possible, keeping both feet in place. I use an inverted pendulum model for balancing, which is simpler than the ragdoll and analytical closed form solutions exist, but i needed to use Mathematica to deal with the equations.

Make it walk, which is much easier than the balancing problem. (That's where i am right now.)

Make it run, climp, swim, carry and placing objects, pointing a gun.

Attempt some melee combat.

Mission accomplished. Animation is now offically dead. :D

Blackberry said:
With a director saying “I want you to show me 100 different sucssefull light attacks on the same enemy, and they all look totally different!

They will be all differnt by default, but that's not what the game designing director wants.
He wants that the enemies are predictable, which is a requirement for a good action game.
He also wants low latency.
I expect some new problems on those things, but i have solutions in mind.

You obviously have some issue with my Moneky game JoeJ….. but honestly, can you think of a better video game for developers to develope/showcase some of this simulation stuff!

it involves just 1 character instead of 10, and that's obviously gotta be way easier to do!

And contains no action, so no need to worry about the massive effect that this would have on the gameplay of an action game!

And the gameplay (about picking stuff up and using it) and the camera (upclose and personal) are perfect for this stuff! (No developer is going to spend half the budget for one fancy little effect in the background!)

Yes its a bit full on what we programmers have to accomplish these days, its past our wildest dreams now, but it just turns out it wasnt as hard as we thought.

Things are rather put on their head… with games being real now.

I show my little brother my graphics, and he barely even responds at all, theres no wows anymore, no-one really even cares.

I just keep on going regardless, I need to finish what I started 20 or so years ago, starting with direct x 6 in the very beginning doing 2d games!!!

Active ragdolls are the future. so get your physics engine done, then do the motor search and get ur living creatures going!! everything is different now! but its all the more possible!!

Magnus what do you think about games with deeper interactions with the environment?

We all agree about the aesthetic value, but can you see any ways that it could also benefit the gameplay?

Would you like to see any puzzle games centred around this idea?

Deeper interactions, that would involve more modelling, more physical phenomena and better collision detections.

Then u could maybe look inside a lock to pick it. And maybe if u were to bash the door down, the lock bar is actually real holding it there, and u need to bust through properly.

But I guess the problem is, if all the game is… is closer to reality, the more its uninteresting in a way. It should be well away from here thats the point of loading up the game.

There's no reason why physics can't be used in a fantasy settings!

Blackberry said:
You obviously have some issue with my Moneky game JoeJ….. but honestly, can you think of a better video game for developers to develope/showcase some of this simulation stuff!

Yes, i can imagine a better demonstration of physics in games.
But no, i have no issue with your game.
In fact i can not well imagine what your game is, and i think you failed to illsutrate your concept well enough for some audience. The saying ‘hm, but that sounds more like RPG to me’ was an expression of confusion. You should clarify such confusion, instead attacking it.

Idk, but if i have to explain some game, i start with what we see on screen. Is it top down, 3rd or 1st person, or something else.
Next is controlls. Can i control a character and camera with mouselook like Quake, or is it some clumsy console crap like Super Mario 64, or point and click with mousepoitner?

This makes 99% of the game. People must know that. So i would talk about that first.

After that i'd like to know what's the goal of the game, and how player progression works.

Only then it matters which tools you offer to achieve such progress, actually solving problems in a physics sandbox environment.

At this point i have the necesseary mental image about your game, and usually i seek for potential issues and flaws. Becasue that's where all those dev hours go into. That's what we want to avoid if possible. So that's what i talk about if you ask for feedback on a game idea on a site like this.
Listing up potential issues does NOT mean i would not like your game, or think it's a bad idea, or any negativity at all.

You simply got it wrong. But maybe that's my fault, considering this happens quite often with newcomers here recently. Idk.

Blackberry said:
And the gameplay (about picking stuff up and using it) and the camera (upclose and personal) are perfect for this stuff! (No developer is going to spend half the budget for one fancy little effect in the background!)

1st or 3rd person? And where is the adoption from point and click adventures?
Still confused about that.

MagnusWootton said:
I show my little brother my graphics, and he barely even responds at all, theres no wows anymore, no-one really even cares.

Yeah, the intial sensation only lasted while we had this constant amount of progress. 16 colors→256. 8bit→64bit. 3D gfx in realtime. Shadows in realtime. Next game twice as large as the current.
During this period games felt awesome not only becasue of the games themselves, we have also added an expecatation that the future game will be even better.

What do we have now? Metaverse! NFTs! Pathtracing an 2000$ GPU! AI NPCs which can talk!
But i don't want any of this. They try to convince me that i want it, but no thanks. It's crap.
Though, maybe that's a bit off from games, so let's look at that:
Huge Live Service games which shut down after running 2 weeks. Good Studios getting closed for bad reasons. Platform holders and publishers are huge and evil tech mega corps like in an dystopian trash movie from the 80's. Devs show their new hairstyle on Geoffs shows, but no new games. It's rather just iterations of older and highly successful ones.
And when the show is over, there was not a single game i would like to play, as expected.

So yeah, we're stuck for both technical and economical reasons. The ship is sinking. But maybe it's for good at this point. Pushing the reset button is often a good idea.

Seems all those companies can't deal with the fact that growdth is no longer possible.
They fucked it up, and independence must be the future.

I have real-time shadows and global illumination (well, second bounces, but still).

P.S. My favourite game ever is Thexder. Surely you know of it – it was published by the same company that did King's Quest IV (my second favourite game ever) :)

You're off topic Taby!

Give us an example of how you think more complex interactions with the environment, could aid to gameplay, or create who new types of games?